So What Made You First Start To Doubt?

As weird as it is, I think it was the attitude of my former "fellow" Christians that started me on the road to doubt. Even though I've got a bachelors in Physics and have generally held a belief in evolution and big bang cosmology for most of the believing stage of my life, it really wasn't science that brought up questions(cognitive dissonance at its best). I think I've always generally never had a connection with anyone in any church I had ever attended. Mainly since most Christians, especially in the south, are non-intellectuals. But I think it really started when I began listening to extreme metal. I couldn't understand how anyone could look down on something that I loved so much and felt so natural to listen to. I can't tell you how many people have told me that its "the devils music"(even though most of the lyrics are socio-political).

Of course later on I did my research and discovered how ridiculous my former beliefs were. So who or what started you on your path to disbelief?

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When I was young I believed in the bible in a literal sense. At some point I realized that the creation story and the flood and the dates listed in the bible conflict with what we know about history. At this point, I was told that the stories were figurative, that there wasn't an actual Adam and Eve, that Moses was like the parables. I started to evaluate the validity of the bible and decided that it is absolutely unreliable.

So I guess finding out that the bible is not true in a literal sense is what caused me to start doubting.

Mine was a saying that said something like, if god is all knowing, all powerful and does no wrong, then why did he/she/it mess up and have to start over? Why didn't he/she/it do it right the first time?

The seeds of doubt for were first planted, in my case, in my Catholic Elementary School and even more so in Catholic High School, there were just so many inconsistencies in the teachings and hypocrisy in the instructors. By my second year of college I was pretty much Catholic in name only although there were periods where I made a concerted effort to return. I studied all different beliefs and reached the conclusion that one single belief system couldn't be the correct one, therefore they're all wrong. I'll go into more details in later posts..this is my first post here. One story I'll share immediately. When my first son was about 2 years old things just weren't right with his progress and we eventually had him evaluated. He is moderately autistic and his IQ tests put him at mildly retarded. It has been a challenge for my wife and I, but a couple of things well meaning and religious realtives have said really got under my skin.

"God never gives us more than we can handle" - I love this one, my usual response is something to the effect of "I guess the young guy that just jumped off the tappan zee bridge didn't know about that".

"God only gives special children to special parents" - Again, well intended, but after being in and around the community of parents with special needs or, to use words that are near forbidden in the community, mental handicaps, I can assure anyone that there are plenty of parents who basically abandon their children.

I hear these two statements made on occasion and think of a guy I knew that committed suicide because he just couldn't handle the life of being a father to such a child.

Rather than appeal to an invisible father I accepted it as something that happens in life that I have to deal with. My son is now 18 and he's a joy, a lot of work, but he is who he is and we make the best life we can for him. He's happy and our family is too.

An interview with Madalyn Murray in Playboy when I was 12. Though my family went to church sporadically, I didn't take religion seriously after that. When I began teaching at my current institution in 1995, I was plugged into World literature, about which I knew very little. First on the schedule was the epic of Gilgamesh. which features a flood story essentially the same as the Noah story, but hundreds of years older. So much for "inspired" Scriptures. I started studying out of curiosity, gradually realizing that I was surrounded by people who think the Bible is LITERALLY true. Amazing.

In the 1950s I was in college in Florida studying math. I quit Catholicism and visited the college atheist club, where I heard students claiming to know that no god existed. I believed their claims were as unsupported by evidence as the claims I'd heard in 12 years of Catholic school religion classes and chose agnosticism.

Twenty years later I was in San Francisco and still an agnostic. American Atheists were convening there and I wanted to hear Madelyn Murray, the woman whose efforts resulted in taking religion out of public schools.

I left the convention persuaded that she needed religion because, without it to fight, she would have to find a new life purpose. I remained an agnostic. Politically I was an independent, but when Reagan brought the xians into the Republican Party I knew I wouldn't vote Republican until the xians quit the Party.

I now tell people I'm an atheist. I pay dues to several church-state separationist organizations but engage xians in verbal combat only when they push their beliefs in my direction.

The essay winner in the recent FFRF newsletter who cited the religious provisions in the constitutions of two Islamic nations supplied the best evidence I've seen that America is not founded on religion. To see his evidence, search on Pakistan constitution or Afghanistan constitution.

As a child, I used the word god to answer questions I didn't know the real answers to, but I had no understanding of what god was supposed to be, and I didn't really care. I was never brainwashed into believing Christianity or any other religion so I never had a better defined concept of god drilled into me. As a result, any belief I had was too weak to last into my teen years. Every time I considered a strange belief, whether it was related to god or not, I did some research and listened to those who challenged the belief. When I was fifteen, I started listening to atheist vloggers on youtube and watching debates and I started to see that there were no good arguments to support the conclusion that god exists; or spirits, ufos, and astrology for that matter.

The best way to sustain belief in an unsubstantiated claim is to close your ears to your challengers. Thankfully I never did that.

I was training for the ministry, but the "calling of god" came to me by way of my parents. Fascinated as a young man by the bible and christianity, I studied with Berean School of the Bible and also became a student of Finis Dake. These are mail order courses, but many fundies have done them. Dake was far ahead of his time, but even today the christian take on the bible is that "it is god's word" and that's a given. To even suggest otherwise is a "sin."

But that doesn't make any sense!

Over the years I was seeing the light slowly, in and out of church, had my own demons mostly because of what I was taught, then just over a year ago I realized a rational approach. God and the bible are imaginary. The bible contains no evidence. It is a book made of many other books that were decided on and voted on in the time of Constantine. It is not devine.

So, you enjoy listening to extreme metal. It's not my cup of tea, but neither is loud blarring christian rock music. I'm not to happy with others that tell us what loud music to listen to. Do what you like.

At 67 I'm not out to everyone in my family. I don't want to hurt anybody, but I do say I'm a proud atheist. There is one drawback in this for me. Today I have to have demonstrable evidence. I find that this means I cannot enjoy and believe in evrything that I excepted before. There is just not enough evidence.

I never really was a religious person but I started to doubt religion as a child just by thinking about it. I took religion just like Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and other mythological figures. After that I thought of religion as a typical belief until much later when I realized all the terrible things religion causes, such as wars, terrorism and violence. My thoughts of religion just kept dropping, eventually bringing me to my current position as an anti-religionist.

So, extreme metal is "the devil's music." Not my cup of tea, but who can decide or declare that some mythical charactor listens to a particular kind of music? Maybe they got that idea from movies or the soundtrack from one. On other sites you read a post saying that if you do not believe in god you "are just the devil's little bitch boy." WTF is that about? Both of these charactors come out of the same "holy book." Now we are at the base of everything. I was trained as a minister and finally figured it out. The bible uses circular reasoning. (Sorry. The book cannot prove itself) In any belief system that requires the supernatural or other types of superstition to survive, you find a lot of circular reasoning and no evidence.

I'm a 67 year old man and finally figured it out a year ago and declared myself atheist. All of my studies helped me make this decission. Trust me. God is not trying to get ahold of you. There is no "devine plan" for your life. You are about as "special" as anyone else here, and we are all on this earth together.

Honestly, it was the goodness and decency of an atheist family I knew as a child. (Atheists, as we were taught, weren't supposed to be ABLE to be good.) But it took 40 more years of incongruencies before I finally woke up.